An irregular blog which muses on WHY I love genealogy and HOW it frustrates me.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

A Generous Community

To begin: the problem at WikiTree mentioned in my post of April 14 has been fixed because I followed the advice of Heather Kuhn Roelker and Cheryl Cayemberg. Chris Whitten of WikiTree was very helpful; I now have a smaller , reasonably accurate family tree. AND the placement of the tree on a public site has led to correspondence between me and a cousin-in-law. She has sent me information that has added about 80 people to my father's family; she has also sent me a picture of my great grandmother and has shown me an interesting site which includes a set of writings of my aunt's (my father's sister) about our "founding" ancestor. This is a rich reward. Thank you, Heather, Cheryl, Chris, and Becky (the cousin).

I have a bunch of sensitivities to airborne substances that is usually not a problem. But at times I get an overdose and have an allergy attack. These attacks can sap my energy to the point that making the bed or loading the washing machine is almost too much work. Most days, I manage to make myself do the usual household tasks and also to accomplish something in genealogy (or in cross-stitch, another of my 3 obsessions). But when your energy is that low you make mistakes so I usually do only easy project.

For me learning has always been fun and fairly easy. So during this unusually long and difficult allergy season, I've been learning. I've been following several new-to-me blogs (and adding blogs to that list), I've been attending webinars (I think I'm a webinar junkie), and I've bought webinar CDs for restudy, or to compensate for missing a webinar when an allergy attack caused me to sleep through the session instead of attending it.

So now I have a better organization plan for storing my paper files (better because I find it easier to keep working at it) and I'm using Dropbox, and I've been to ScanFest, and … (you understand). And then came this invitation to take a course on SecondLife! So I got an avatar, and I went to the Fire Pit on Monday and learned from Genie Weezles how to navigate, I studied the handout and the Introduction part of the video, and I went back to the Fire Pit on Tuesday for the discussion. I think I'm such a newbie at Genealogy that others will learn more than I will, but I already know that I will extend my basic understanding. So thank you, DearMYRTLE for pointing me here.

I cannot describe in detail what I learned on Tuesday night, and this gives me confidence. I expressed a thought about the Inferential Genealogy Process and how it fits into meeting Genealogical Proof Standards and someone agreed with me. I queried the relative importance of two types of information and Clarise Beaumont emphasized that I needed both. And so on. In my case, what I learned Tuesday night slid seamless into what I have been trying to format about "doing" Genealogy, giving me confidence that I am on the correct path.

Then Clarise gave us an assignment! Besides studying Case1 before the Sunday meeting, those of us who Blog are to write a blog about our experience. Now, I'm not quite sure if my Blog will be what Clarise meant (no this one isn't it, this is merely my intro), but the blog is already half outlined and that process has helped me learn something.

So thanks again to all the experienced Genealogists out there who offer such generous help to the rest of us. I don't know where you find the time, but I'm very glad that you do. I'll be back soon with an account of my first experiences with the Inferential Genealogy Process.

[And by the way: someone at the Fire Pit mentioned Ben Sayer's Lineascope. I didn't respond at the time because it wasn't appropriate. But if that person reads this and has the time, could we talk about Lineascope? You can tell me when and where.]

I'm the one who brought up Lineascope. I will be happy to talk with you about it, even though my use of it to this point has been minimal. For a visual thinker, I think it's definitely a tool worth trying. You can email me at lostancestors [at] gmail [dot] com and we can go from there! :)

About Me

I've been retired since 1987, but didn't begin doing genealogy seriously until 2007 — what a WASTE of 20 years.My other hobby is stitchery — focusing on the various types of counted embroidery. Also, I read like breathing and enjoy interacting with other readers.